Well, budget season is now upon us in Jacksonville.  In his recent budget address, Mayor John Peyton asked for a 12 percent increase in our millage rate.  According to Peyton, without this tax hike, we will have to make deep cuts in services vital to the Jacksonville taxpayer.  We are talking about closing fire stations.  Parks will become jungles without adequate landscaping.  Our streets will be overflowing with criminals if the Jacksonville Journey is not funded for another year.  Peyton’s speech enters the world of hyperbole when he stated “Is it your plan to shut down government?”. Chicken Little is no longer saying that the sky is falling. Instead, he just threw up his wings and left town.

What makes the budget process insane is that in a scant two weeks after the budget was unveiled, the City Council must decide what the initial millage rate will be for the city budget. Yes, that is two weeks to study the budget and determine if a millage rate increase is needed or whether more cuts in the budget are possible. Of course, the millage rate can be set lower later once budgets cuts have been identified. But once the genie is let out of the bottle by giving the mayor his millage rate increase, reducing it could be harder to do this once the mayor gets the momentum moving in his direction.

However, if we do not want the millage rate increase and we do not want the mayor’s three fees, we have to identify what to cut in the budget. The worst thing that we can do is to cut say 10 percent from everything in the budget. Not everything is equal in the budget. Public safety and roads are a far higher priority than the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission and the Cultural Council. Prioritizing city spending is crucial as we must cut from the budget those expenditures that are superfluous to its city’s central mission of providing essential services utilized by the vast majority of the public that cannot be provided by the private sector.

Of course, that sounds great in theory. However, the reason that so many things find their way into the budget is that there are often influential interest groups fighting for every one of these government programs. While the individual cost to the taxpayer for any one of those budget items may not be that much, it is means a lot more to the non profit groups or government agencies that receive city funding. So the incentives for the taxpayer to balk at paying for this or that are not as high as the incentives for the interest groups to fight for the taxpayer funding of their pet project. Taxpayers begin to rebel when enough of these government programs accumulate over time and the resulting taxes reach a breaking point that usually leads to a tax revolt.

As depressing as that sounds, it is imperative that we do not give up the fight. In the next few months, Concerned Taxpayers will be reviewing the city budget and identifying where the budget can be cut. When this review is complete, then we will present our results to the City Council and the news media as an alternative to the mayor’s budget.